This blog chronicles my research, experiments and studies about wild women past and present, from Empress Theodora of Constantinople to Lena Dunham.

Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Bad Girls Are Not Nice

Becoming a Bad Girl is not a self-help book. I’m trying to write honestly about how I was feeling as I went through a horrible time in my life, and how studying a group of “notorious women in history,” for lack of a better term, cheered me up. But please don’t take my story as some form of inspirational self-help screed. Just about every bad girl on my list used some form of prostitution to get ahead, and I don’t want to be accused of recommending prostitution as a good method to achieve happiness.

But there it is: prostitution is a fact of life that shows up often in my bad girls’ stories. Some of them—-Ninon de Lenclos and Catherine Walters, for example—-were prostitutes, pure and simple. Catherine, who also went by the name of Skittles, made quite a successful go of whoring herself out in Victorian London, and her customers included sensitive poets, rich aristocrats and many straight-laced men who kept their wives tucked up at home when they ventured into the demi-monde of Mayfair.

What did I learn from Skittles? I learned that a smart prostitute lives to please herself and that she uses sex to achieve personal fulfillment. I hope Skittles actually liked sex-—I choose to believe she loved sex-—because it would confirm my notion that a bad girl is always in control of her destiny. (Skittles was not a literary whore, unfortunately, and she never wrote down her thoughts.) A bad girl does not submit to authority, she has loads of love affairs with men from both the upper crust and the lower castes, and she enjoys shocking people with her promiscuity. A bad girl is capable of falling deeply in love but avoids it if she can because she is more smitten with her independence.

Don’t forget, my bad girls lived in an age when many women had no property rights, so the advantage of being an unmarried whore was that you could have a home of your own that no man could ever throw you out of. Mind you, my bad girls loved men and usually preferred their company to women’s. Men had the freedom to be where the power was, they were uncomplicated and self-contained. Skittles hated other women, in fact. And quite a few of my bad girls actively chose to “live like a man”—-Ninon’s words—-and actively resisted becoming too dependent on others.

What about feminism, you ask. Were bad girls feminists? Uh, no. Sorry. They were either too rich to care about becoming feminists or too poor to pay any attention to the issue because they were too busy working for a living. Oh wait, there was one huge feminist in the bunch: Victoria Woodhull. You know, the bad girl who ran for US President in 1872 on a platform of free love, legalized prostitution, easier divorce laws, voting rights for women, vegetarianism, labor reform, magnetic healing, spiritualism, etc. Victoria was a feminist to put feminists to shame. But she was a one-off. Otherwise, my bad girls either didn’t know about feminism or simply ignored it, which I think is funny. They lived like men yet made no apologies for being women. A bad girl was what she was, and that was that.

While a bad girl might enjoy the over-the-top girliness of wearing costumes full of jewels and feathers, she would equally enjoy dressing like a man when it suited her. Isabelle Eberhardt always dressed like a man, and asked to be called by an Arabic man’s name, Si Mahmoud, because that’s what she was into. Catherine the Great dressed like a man when she rode horses—-who was going to stop her? she was the Empress of all the Russias, OK?—-and Victoria Woodhull wore trousers when she went out riding on that new invention of the 19th century, the bicycle.

So there you have it. My bad girls were not nice people. Oh, they might have made the pretense of being nice when it suited them, but still, they weren’t nice. I like that about them. Because I think I was too nice when I started my bad girls study. Men took advantage of me, friends bossed me around, and being a placating doormat for other people wasn’t making me any happier. It’s six years now since I started studying my bad girls, and I’m much happier now. I couldn’t say for sure that studying bad girls cured me of my affliction, but they were right there with me, their stories running around inside my head, as I made changes and took action that brought me to a better place in my life.

And that's not all! Yes, there's much more on my list of what makes a bad girl bad. Keep watching my blog--my next post will be about self-discipline and suicide. Oh and charm and vanity, which I think I promised in my previous post but didn't get around to this time because I was too busy talking about whoring yourself out.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

dude, I never knew about this Wooduhll woman, but she is a wicked kick in the a-s-s. How far did she get in her bid for presidency?

As for whoring oneself out- how does this relate to today's marketing mania? Where everyone is implored to sell oneself and make a "brand" of themselves, for job interviews, bosses, to win boyfriends, whatever. Do we all prostitute ourselves when we get up and go in the morning to the boss's place of work, helping them sell their snake oil, or snake oil shares or whatever it is?

Dude, thanks for reading my stories. Unfortunately, Victoria got thrown in jail midway through her presidential campaign, supposedly because she was publishing obscenities in her newspaper (she was the first publisher of a woman-owned newspaper in America). The real reason she was thrown in jail, of course, was because she wouldn't keep her mouth shut. Basically, she had an affair with a famous preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, and she outed his adulterous, hypocritical ass. She had very strong free-love principles and believed that everyone should be honest about who they were screwing. This didn't go down well with the powers that be, and it ruined her presidential campaign. Vickie was languishing in jail when Election Day 1872 arrived in November. Retired Union Civil War General Ulysses S. Grant won his second term for the U.S. presidency in a landslide, and only a few popular votes were counted for Victoria.

Oh, here's a funny and up-to-date part of Victoria and Henry's love affair. I mentioned that she was really into spirituality, right? Well, Victoria ranked Henry at an “Amativeness 8” on her sex appeal scale of 1 to 10. She wrote: “The amative impulse is the physiological basis of character. It is this which emanates zest and magnetic power to his whole audience through the organism of the great preacher. Every great man of Mr. Beecher’s type has had, in the past, and will ever have the need for, and the right to, the loving manifestations of many women, and when the public graduates out of the ignorance and prejudices of its childhood, it will recognize this necessity and its own injustice. Mr. Beecher’s grand and amative nature is not, then, the bad element in the whole matter, but intrinsically the good thing, and one of God’s best gifts to the world.”

About Me

Joyce Hanson is a writer, reporter and editor who covers a broad range of subjects. Her professional background, which includes positions with media organizations and the corporate world, has given her an understanding of the demands of the news cycle. Joyce’s editorial skills extend across multimedia platforms, whether in print or online content management systems.

Joyce's primary interest is good story-telling. She has written about finance, technology, entrepreneurs, careers, small business, restaurants and food, green living, travel, community affairs, the arts and media and wicked women in history.

A Chicago native who now resides in New York, Hanson earned a master’s degree in journalism from the Medill School at Northwestern. She is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate with a bachelor of arts in French from the University of Minnesota.